mastershakeman posted:

a) challenge them to be good roleplayers by openly rolling for something they don't know about and tell them they have to ignore it if they question it
b) do fake rolls all throughout every session to obfuscate when the real rolls happen. i'm a fan of this one

Glagha posted:

I know, I played 4e. I still weep openly as I run my fingers over the warlord page in my PHB.

Blooming Brilliant posted:

Getting hold of a 5E module is probably easiest, so I'd recommend Storm King's Thunder. From what I've read it's a very solid adventure, and requires less prep than something like Tombs of Annihilation/Curse of Strahd/Tales From the Yawning Portal.

I've been playing in a Yawning Portal campaign. The DM says it's pretty great prep-wise since all the adventures are self-contained and well designed, but you would need to homebrew how each adventure flows into the next.

Nephzinho posted:

Yawning Portal I always saw as a bunch of modules to fit into other campaigns, not a book to run through cover to cover. I have a few dungeons in my current big game that just pull the layout/materials/general theme from TYP with tweaks to difficulty made for the party level.

Lurdiak posted:

I just don't understand the mindset that makes people declare fighters should obey the laws of physics in a universe where nothing else does.

Lurdiak posted:

I just don't understand the mindset that makes people declare fighters should obey the laws of physics in a universe where nothing else does.

Lurdiak posted:

I just don't understand the mindset that makes people declare fighters should obey the laws of physics in a universe where nothing else does.

Guy A. Person posted:

Also "laws of physics" means "what an out of shape person thinks a dude with armor and a sword can do" which usually amounts to the most unimpressive of poo poo

Blooming Brilliant posted:

Getting hold of a 5E module is probably easiest, so I'd recommend Storm King's Thunder. From what I've read it's a very solid adventure, and requires less prep than something like Tombs of Annihilation/Curse of Strahd/Tales From the Yawning Portal.

I've been playing in a Yawning Portal campaign. The DM says it's pretty great prep-wise since all the adventures are self-contained and well designed, but you would need to homebrew how each adventure flows into the next.

Lurdiak posted:

I just don't understand the mindset that makes people declare fighters should obey the laws of physics in a universe where nothing else does.

Mendrian posted:

"Some people don't want to make anything complex and just want to hit things with their sword."

"What? No, not me, never me, I'm on my third Sorcerer/Warlock/Paladin gestalt hybrid."

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Man, I'm kinda finding it hilarious that you guys are using 4e as a game where fighters got narrative powers. Literally nobody got useful narrative abilities when I stopped playing 4e, the game where you can't even smash an object without arguing with the DM. The game was so terrified of giving players any kind of noncombat ability that familars got special rules where they couldn't interact with anything and fighter "utility" powers were just various forms of buffs (as opposed to hacking through walls or performing awesome feats of strength).

Anyway, onto fighter chat, we're never gotta get a cool fighter because D&D has always been incoherent and is held together by nostalgia and identifying as a D&D player rather than actually analyzing the rules. So let's do that.

Fighter was never meant to be a bigboy class: A few years back I got to play 1e for a session with E Gary Gygax. If you've ever played 1e, what immediately jumps out is that the paladin and the ranger can do everything a fighter can, but better and the drawback was that you had to roll better stats. Thieves were pretty much useless. Yea, they attempted to fix this with weapon specialization and whatnot, but at the end of the day the fighter didn't do much besides autoattack and the wizard had a whole pile of weird poo poo they could do. They got castles and followers and cool stuff, but I've never seen anyone actually implement this in a D&D game.

High levels didn't exist: As much as some posters here enjoy discussing the ultimate power of the 3.5 wizard, he's really not that great at low levels. I asked Gygax what high level fighters had originally been intended to do - and got the answer that people really didn't play at high levels. People end up not playing high level D&D because it becomes stupid -> game designers decide not to care about it -> repeat indefinitely. Sure, the 3.5 low level mage can do a bunch of stuff indefinitely, but for social interaction or sneaking you're going to bring a rogue, because Diplomacy is better than every mind control spell in the game (short of maybe Mind Rape). This isn't to say that 3.5 spellcasters don't become loving bonkers nuts after about level 5-7 (depending on class), but an invisibility spell at 3rd level is a web you're not preparing, and you sure as poo poo aren't taking scorching ray because the fighter in the party can probably deal more damage than that while spending no resources whatsoever. The reason we can't go Augean stables on fools at high level is because high level was not very well thought out, and I'd bet dollars to donuts all the high level crazy wizard poo poo was intended to be NPC-only.

Really, the bigger problem with fighter is that no one - even in this thread - can articulate what the hell they are supposed to do out of combat, and so when people post lists of poo poo like "take half damage" or "save or dies" that doesn't fix poo poo. You could build fighters who exploded higher level opponents in one round in 3.X. It's not hard or interesting, you stack all the charge damage multipliers, or Robilar's Gambit/AoOs, or go more controllery and start spamming trips. Sure, you can kill things - even better than most wizards - but you're still just kinda sitting out the noncombat encounters waiting for somebody to cast teleport.

Really, killing the rogue class, folding it into the fighter, and giving the result level appropriate abilities like feats of strength or guile that really could just be refluffed spells (Odysseus sneaks so good we just say he invisible!) would go a long way toward fixing all of this.

mango sentinel posted:

Nobody said 4e fighters got narrative shaping power. They're saying everyone was on the same playing field because no one did.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Man, I'm kinda finding it hilarious that you guys are using 4e as a game where fighters got narrative powers. Literally nobody got useful narrative abilities when I stopped playing 4e, the game where you can't even smash an object without arguing with the DM.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Really, the bigger problem with fighter is that no one - even in this thread - can articulate what the hell they are supposed to do out of combat, and so when people post lists of poo poo like "take half damage" or "save or dies" that doesn't fix poo poo. You could build fighters who exploded higher level opponents in one round in 3.X. It's not hard or interesting, you stack all the charge damage multipliers, or Robilar's Gambit/AoOs, or go more controllery and start spamming trips. Sure, you can kill things - even better than most wizards - but you're still just kinda sitting out the noncombat encounters waiting for somebody to cast teleport.

Smashing Link posted:

Combining rogue and fighter is not a bad idea.

AlphaDog posted:

Could you not end that argument by reading pages 65 and 66 of the DMG and following the rules you found there?

Mendrian posted:

Nobody can articulate what a fighter is supposed to do!

Literally pages of speculation.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

That's...not what I meant to say.

What I'm saying is that while we all might have a vision of what we want the fighter to look like (actually competent with a dope bag of tricks out of combat) the actual vision that has been passed down by the incestuous group of D&D designers is a vague clusterfuck of being boring and lovely, and to actually get past somebody needs to throw away all the old stuff and figure out what this drat class is supposed to do. Is he supposed to be a lord who can call on political connections and military force to get things done? Is he a hero of legend who can smite mountains and bring them down? Is he for some reason a random genericman who is adventuring with literal god(plz no)? No two people seem to have the same vision of this guy, because "a guy who fights" literally describes every class in the game.

The fact that nobody actually can come up with a common viable alternative for this class is why we get Buhlman and Mearls throwing together a boring and inadequate pile of numbers, and charging you 50 bucks while they inflate the dragons' stats.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

That's...not what I meant to say.

What I'm saying is that while we all might have a vision of what we want the fighter to look like (actually competent with a dope bag of tricks out of combat) the actual vision that has been passed down by the incestuous group of D&D designers is a vague clusterfuck of being boring and lovely, and to actually get past somebody needs to throw away all the old stuff and figure out what this drat class is supposed to do. Is he supposed to be a lord who can call on political connections and military force to get things done? Is he a hero of legend who can smite mountains and bring them down? Is he for some reason a random genericman who is adventuring with literal god(plz no)? No two people seem to have the same vision of this guy, because "a guy who fights" literally describes every class in the game.

The fact that nobody actually can come up with a common viable alternative for this class is why we get Buhlman and Mearls throwing together a boring and inadequate pile of numbers, and charging you 50 bucks while they inflate the dragons' stats.

Guy A. Person posted:

This is fair and I was probably being overly snarky, so sorry about that.

One thing I want to point out tho is that a lot of the stuff you were saying I have already seen discussed in this thread/forum. I started in 3e and kind of ignored other editions and greater meta-D&D discussion up until me and my group had played for several years and I had started to see the seams of the system. So I came to this subforum and started reading up and learned about a bunch of the stuff you outlined: some of Gygax's early fears about the game becoming the "weird Wizard show", the fact that the Fighter started out as the Fighting Man and the Ranger and Paladin were specifically upgrades that you got for rolling higher stats, the lack of high level support basically in any edition (although from stuff I've read here BECMI might have been better about that?) etc.

So I totally get where you're coming from and I think a lot of people here already do, so that's why got kind of annoyed at the idea that nobody has thought of this stuff. I think there's a big anvil named "tradition" hanging over the head of every edition and most people here know that, they're just trying to 1) vent about the fact that good game design has to take a backseat to 40 years of momentum, and 2) hopefully try and convince some people that this is not an ideal state of affairs and theory craft about what can fix it (whether trying out different games like Dungeon World or design their own like Strike! or even just get a posse of like-minded people to hopefully steer future generations of the game in the right direction)

Tendales posted:

-Hey, Lisa, you know what would be better than "nothing"?

-What?

-ANYTHING

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Is he for some reason a random genericman who is adventuring with literal god(plz no)?

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

Really, killing the rogue class, folding it into the fighter, and giving the result level appropriate abilities like feats of strength or guile that really could just be refluffed spells (Odysseus sneaks so good we just say he invisible!) would go a long way toward fixing all of this.

Guy A. Person posted:

Can I ask what the normal scenario where you only have them roll when they might be spotted is? I assume it's something like, they have perfect knowledge of where the enemy is and only need to roll specifically when they are about to do something that would alert them, like sneak past the open room they are all congregating in. Still this seems to me to preclude having some hidden lookout in the trees or whatever, since like you said they would know someone is observing as soon as you called for the roll. I think ambiguity is the better option here.

Splicer posted:

See, this would actually be fine, because it's not about making the character as powerful as the other characters, it's about giving the players equivalent narrative control. FATE derived games handle this by having godpowers come out of your refresh, which means less fate points. You could take the fighter as is but have it come with X storypoints per long rest, which allow the player to make (codified) declarations about things. The Wizard can cast Wish to duplicate spell X, but the Fighter's player can spend a point to find a scroll of spell X. The Wizard can banish the summoned demon to the abyss, but the Fighter's player can say "Oh hey, Warlock? You know this guy. Looks familiar. You think he owes you a favour."

Nehru the Damaja posted:

Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

Running storm king's thunder now as a first-time DM and...the entire first act is kinda left up to the DM. They give you a quick intro-adventure that gets you to level 5, and opening scenario with a few quest hooks, and then a huge list of "locations in the north" and it's up to the DM to make them care. I took material from other places, made up my own stuff, and learned a bunch along the way, but overall the book wasn't much help for a good chunk of it.

FRINGE posted:

If you also go back to TSR style multiclassing (or none at all) that fixes a huge amount of bullshit that game along with the 3e sorcerer/warlock poo poo.